Spotlight: What Barbour's Hometown Was Really Like for Black People

Many are declaring Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's presidential candidacy over before it ever really began, thanks to his musing, in a Weekly Standard interview,
about how integration in his hometown of Yazoo City was pretty much no
biggie. Liberals and conservatives alike are criticizing Barbour for his apparent cluelessness about the Civil Rights Era. But
this is more than a political mini-scandal of the week, Rick Perlstein
argues at Salon. Barbour's "amnesia" says a lot about his generation of
Southern conservatives, and to understand why you have to look at the
real history of Yazoo City in the 1960s. Here are the highlights of his attempt to fact-check and respond to Barbour's recollections.

On Barbour's Notion That the White Citizens Council Kept Out the KKK

The
best that can be said about his recollection is that it is not 100
percent a lie--just deeply confused, mostly wrong, and indicative
above all of a cynical man who has made a lucrative career of exploiting
racial trauma when it suited him, or throwing it down a memory hole
when it did not; which is to say, an archetypal Dixie conservative. ...
While the Citizens Councils were born in 1954 of Brown v. Board of
Education... [the Klan] were
the new kids in town--that it to say, the competition, and low-class
competition at that. ... In Yazoo... the local Citizens' Council did
indeed pass a resolution excoriating the Klan--because 'your Citizen's
Council was formed to preserve separation of the races, and believes
that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization
operating in this field.'

What Race Relations Were Really Like

[Barbour] says the King speech he saw
in '62 was 'full of people, black and white' -- part of his
longstanding pattern of radically distorting the degree of comity
between the races in Mississippi during his youth. In fact, during
Mississippi's race revolution, when blacks and whites occupied the same
space (except when the former were virtual servants and the former
masters), the scene in greater or lesser degrees resembled the chaos
that day in Philadelphia. This was as true in 1966 as it was in 1962. As
The New York Times described the scene in Philadelphia ... '[s]ome 25
white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flared in
to the line of march, their eyes wide with anger," and police didn't
intervene against the ensuing stones, bottles, clubs, and firecrackers
until '[h]alf a dozen Negroes began to fight back.' Then it was on to
Yazoo.

On Barbour's Statement That He Recalls Not MLK, But the Girls at the Rally

I
hope Haley Barbour is just making that last detail up. The menacing
white mobs that gathered at the periphery of civil rights rallies in
places like Yazoo City were almost exclusively male. If he truly
remembers the moment through a cloud of testosterone, the imagery
invokes to me the most Gothic nastiness imaginable. In Black Like Me,
the 1961 classic in which journalist John Howard Griffith blackened his
face to see how race relations worked in the South, Griffith learned
through one white interlocutor 'how all of the white men in the region
craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework
and in his business. "And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of
them since before they ever got on the payroll …We figure we're doing
your people a favor to get some white blood in your kids."'

No way, not
in a million years, am I accusing Haley Barbour of being like this guy.
I'm making a different point. At every important turn in the story,
Barbour emphasizes how little he remembers of this most intense period
imaginable in his beloved home town--it really was no big deal, he
insists. When he does so, this is what he is forgetting: the entire
bad-faith stew of race, sex, and corrupt plutocracy--and its public
repression in images of towns like 'families' and happy Negroes until
outsiders stirred things up--that defined his formative years. He's a
middle-aged Southern conservative. That is what his job is: to
opportunistically 'forget.'

Everyone has someone on their holiday shopping list who’s impossible to buy for. For the second year in a row, we asked Atlantic readers to describe their someone, and brainstormed a few perfect gift ideas for them.